My interest in UFO’s picked up in a hurry when I learned that ATIC was the government agency that was responsible for the UFO project.  And I was really impressed when I found out that the person who sat three desks down and one over from mine was in charge of the whole UFO show.  So when I came to work on my second morning at ATIC and heard the words “flying saucer report” being talked about and saw a group of people standing around the chief of the UFO project’s desk I about sprung an eardrum listening to what they had to say.  It seemed to be a big deal—­except that most of them were laughing.  It must be a report of hoax or hallucination, I remember thinking to myself, but I listened as one of the group told the others about the report.

The night before a Mid-Continent Airlines DC-3 was taxiing out to take off from the airport at Sioux City, Iowa, when the airport control tower operators noticed a bright bluish-white light in the west.  The tower operators, thinking that it was another airplane, called the pilot of the DC-3 and told him to be careful since there was another airplane approaching the field.  As the DC-3 lined up to take off, both the pilots of the airliner and the tower operators saw the light moving in, but since it was still some distance away the DC-3 was given permission to take off.  As it rolled down the runway getting up speed, both the pilot and the copilot were busy, so they didn’t see the light approaching.  But the tower operators did, and as soon as the DC-3 was airborne, they called and told the pilot to be careful.  The copilot said that he saw the light and was watching it.  Just then the tower got a call from another airplane that was requesting landing instructions and the operators looked away from the light.

In the DC-3 the pilot and copilot had also looked away from the light for a few seconds.  When they looked back, the bluish-white light had apparently closed in because it was much brighter and it was dead ahead.  In a split second it closed in and flashed by their right wing—­so close that both pilots thought that they would collide with it.  When it passed the DC-3, the pilots saw more than a light—­ they saw a huge object that looked like the “fuselage of a B-29.”

When the copilot had recovered he looked out his side window to see if he could see the UFO and there it was, flying formation with them.  He yelled at the pilot, who leaned over and looked just in time to see the UFO disappear.

The second look confirmed the Mid-Continent crew’s first impression—­ the object looked like a B-29 without wings.  They saw nothing more, only a big “shadowy shape” and the bluish-white light—­no windows, no exhaust.

The tower had missed the incident because they were landing the other airplane and the pilot and the copilot didn’t have time to call them and tell them about what was going on.  All the tower operators could say was that seconds after the UFO had disappeared the light that they had seen was gone.